


Wishing Only Wounds the Heart

by bravest_person_in_Wonderland



Category: Bandstand - Oberacker/Oberacker & Taylor
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Gen, Hopeful Ending, I hope this doesn’t feel too dark, Julia Trojan appreciation tag, Miscarriage, Sad with a Happy Ending, She's Amazing, the Donny Nova Band are all v good friends, they can be jerks to each other lol, to Julia at least, yeah it's That Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:47:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bravest_person_in_Wonderland/pseuds/bravest_person_in_Wonderland
Summary: There are things Julia can never tell Donny.
Relationships: Donny Novitski/Julia Trojan, Jimmy Campbell & Julia Trojan, Johnny Simpson & Julia Trojan, Julia Trojan & Wayne Wright, Julia Trojan/Michael Trojan, June Adams & Julia Trojan, The Donny Nova Band & Julia Trojan
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	Wishing Only Wounds the Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Other People’s Heartaches](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23066680) by [emmacortana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmacortana/pseuds/emmacortana). 



> I saw this idea in another fic one time and it stuck with me, so it isn't fully my own idea and I can't take credit for it.
> 
> title is from a line in "I'm Not That Girl" from Wicked (which I've been pretty obsessed with lately, hehe) 
> 
> and yeah, I googled it and apparently ultrasounds for pregnancy and stuff weren't a thing until about a decade after this is set, not to mention the printouts, but for the sake of the story I decided to ignore that fact. 😅

There are things she will never tell Donny. He knows a part of what she lost when he fumbled that grenade. He knows she no longer blames him for that, despite how much she wanted to at first. 

(She just needed somewhere for the blame to go, and he was right there — he's always right there, willing to be whatever she needs; that night, she needed a scapegoat, so a scapegoat he became.) 

Julia knows that Donny still blames himself, though, and perhaps he always will. That is why she can't tell him what else she lost, maybe not to the blast that killed Michael, but certainly to the fallout of it. 

There's more than just symbolic meaning to the line in the poem she hands him as an apology — _welcome home, my sons_ — but Donny will never know that. If he knew, it would destroy him even more, and heaven knows he's already been shattered enough for one lifetime. Julia refuses to add anything more to that, if she has any say in the matter. 

The black and white ultrasound photo is tucked away in a corner of the footlocker Donny brought back, the one with Michael's name in blocky stenciled paint on the side of it. Julia put it there, to hide it, to memorialize her husband and her son. Michael never knew. She never got the chance to tell him. The last letter she wrote, that would have overjoyed him if he had gotten to read it — but the telegram came the day before she would have posted it — is folded tightly in the footlocker as well. 

The only person who knows the full extent of Julia's loss is her own mother. She wishes, oh, God, she wishes she could share the private burden of grief she carries — she wrote it into the poem-turned-song, but no one _knows_ — with Donny. With anyone, really. But she can't. She won't. 

(She meets Wayne's children, Emily and Grady, and maybe stares a little bit too long at the little boy. Wayne —standing stiffly about four feet apart from his wife, who's watching Julia interact with the children with a begrudging smile — makes eye contact with her and his eyes ask a question. Julia turns away from him before hers answer it.) 

It was a boy. She had known that already, after the last time her mom took her to the doctor. Michael would have wanted it to be a surprise, but Julia has always been much less keen on surprises. She and her mother went home and wrote down a full page's worth of name ideas — both of their favorite was Elliot — in the back of Julia's journal. 

She ripped that page out right before handing the book to Donny, and spent the rest of the night praying that there wasn't anything else about the baby in that journal for him to see. He never mentioned anything, and Julia took the scribbled page of name ideas and added it to her corner of Michael's footlocker. 

(Johnny, it turns out, is surprisingly good with both math and carpentry. He makes a shadowbox, hands it to her empty and with a lopsided grin tells her it's for memories. She moves her little collection of baby things — the ultrasound printout, the page of names, that last letter — into it, hidden away beneath the thin knitted blanket her mother had passed on from her own mother.) 

They have a performance, at a VA hall in a city about an hour from home, on the anniversary of the day her mother rushed her to the hospital to receive the official proclamation of what they both already knew. There's already been one anniversary — a Sunday, one of the few that Julia didn't attend church on — and this is the second. She calls Donny the night before, the tears already pulling at her eyelids, and says she's not feeling well, can the band go on without her? Apparently, her emotion-stuffy nose is enough to convince him, and he replies of course, let him know if she needs anything. 

June Adams is far from a teetotaler. They get almost drunk on the sofa, Julia still in her pajamas. Neither of them speak a word, but later in the evening, Julia goes to the closet and pulls out the shadowbox, running her fingers over the soft, fraying blanket. She reads down the list of names until she comes to the one circled in dark ink, skims the letter — _"Michael, if you're not sitting down when you read this, you should be before you continue. Otherwise, show it to Nova or one of the other guys and let them force you to sit down. Alright? Alright. Michael Trojan, love of my life, you are going to be a father."._

She had been high on giddiness when she wrote it, and she remembered the excitement as she tucked it in an envelope and set it aside to send a few days later. The telegram came first and then there was no one to tell, and then nothing to tell them. Her coworkers had to have known, she had been showing already, but never breathed a word — she didn't know whether to be grateful or bitter. 

(She only knew Donny as "Nova" back then, the punk kid Michael wrote about and then taked about when he came home on leave — the leave that must have been the beginning of what could have been. Now she knows him for herself, for himself, and she knows why Michael talked about him so much.) 

Life goes on, the band plays, and Elliot is not-quite-forgotten — a mother can never forget her son, and some days the grief, the _what could have been,_ hits Julia so hard she can't breathe — for another year. 

She surprises herself along with Donny in being the one who brings up the idea of marriage first. It's Christmas, and the whole band is at her house for a holiday dinner. June is in her element, playing hostess and maybe surrogate mother to Julia's boys, getting wine-drunk with Davy and glaring at Nick when he gets overly tetchy. 

Amidst the chaos, sitting across the table from Donny with mugs of cider cupped between each of their hands, she finds the words _"when we get married, I keep Michael's name"_ slipping out of her mouth before she thinks to stop them. The way Donny stares at her almost makes her laugh, but not quite. They both know that marriage is their long-range goal, have known it for a long time, but a long time is what they've needed. Neither one of them has brought it up this plainly before. 

Donny's gaze shift from Julia's face to her left hand before his shock changes to a soft, sad smile and he nods once, firmly, finally. 

(She still wears the ring that matched Michael's, even though his is probably buried in Manila or lost somewhere else in the Islands. A part of her mind that she tries to ignore recognizes the possibility that it's melted onto the hand of his corpse.) 

They leave unspoken the conversation of which surname their future children will have. Julia doesn't even know if she's capable of having children anymore. 

(She spends more time with Wayne's kids, gets to know his wife. She stops visiting when she realizes that Grady and Emily are more comfortable around her than they are with their own father. She cries the night she recognizes it, both for Wayne and the things he faces, and, selfishly, for herself. Grady reminds her so much of what could have been, the future she had already begun to envision for Elliot.) 

Donny throws himself into the music harder than normal when they play on the anniversary of Michael's death, and Julia's voice chokes up more as she sings. She hears the chords that Donny plays, the way he pounds the keys. She casts a smile over her shoulder at the band when she sings _"welcome home, my boys"._ Her hand, the one not steadying the microphone stand, unconsciously drifts to her stomach when she forms the words _"welcome home, my son,"_ — she slips up and makes it a singular noun, instead of plural, and her voice wavers. 

She looks to the sky when her song mentions her husband, and manages a shaky smile back at Donny as she says _"welcome home, my love."_

(Jimmy sits with her at the bar later, while Donny lets Davy's jokes and Johnny's sweet innocence distract him from the day. He waits for a long time before he asks if she lost more than her husband before they met, and Julia waits another long time before she nods. Jimmy has long been the one who holds the band together on a more metaphysical level, and now his hand on her shoulder holds Julia together as she whispers the secret that she's longed to tell for nearly three years. He understands without needing to be told that Donny can't know this.) 

Julia goes to the hospital the day after she accepts Donny's marriage proposal, sits in front of a doctor she hasn't seen since Elliot almost existed, and cries when she's assured that she can still be a mother someday. 

She cries when she walks down the aisle, arm linked in Jimmy's — he's become like a brother to her over these last several years, where she had never had one and her father had chosen his work secretary over her — and sees tears in Donny's eyes when she stands in front of him at the altar. His fingers brush Michael's ring as he slides the new one onto her hand, the two circles of metal clinking together almost poetically. They had agreed months ago that along with keeping Michael's name, Julia would keep his ring. She can move on, but there are some things she cannot let go of. 

(The shadowbox is in her closet in the home she and Donny begin together, now, and the first time Donny sees it, he hollers into the kitchen asking what it is. Julia feels her entire body go burning-cold and pretends not to hear. She's not hiding the truth from him, she wouldn't do that, but she knows better than anyone that he still doesn't sleep half the time, and telling him about Elliot wouldn't help.) 

It's a Friday night playing one of their usual places in Cleveland when Julia passes around the new ultrasound photo and her boys hoot and holler and Johnny hugs her for nearly a full minute — that minute gives her just enough time to blink away the tears that burn at her eyes so she can grin at them all when she pulls away. 

(Julia and Donny's first child grows up on the road with the band, his ragtag group of godfathers, clinging to the old knitted blanket Julia pulled out of the shadowbox the day she hesitantly showed its contents to Donny — she had sworn never to tell him, but she couldn't _not_ anymore, and mourning together was more freeing than she could have imagined — and occasionally playing with Grady and Emily Wright. His name is Elliot Michael Novitski.)

**Author's Note:**

> yes, the name "Elliot" came from exactly where you think it did. what do you expect, this is the musical that literally named one of Wayne's kids after the actor's own son, so it seemed fitting. 
> 
> comments make my day if you wanna drop one, I love hearing other people's thoughts! 😁


End file.
